Fund NIH, build on legacy

Thoru Pederson

Published Thursday January 10, 2013 at 6:00 am

Most readers of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette would have had no reason to recognize or resonate with the death of the biomedical scientist Elwood Jensen, reported recently in the New York Times. But this scientist played a huge role in the modern era of breast cancer research, and his role had a significant local connection.

In the early 1970s, a young British scientist named Craig Jordan arrived as a trainee at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury. The Foundation had arisen from Clark University and had by this time become an international leader in steroid hormone science, the reason Mr. Jordan had come to soak up the powerful ambience under way.

During Jordanís apprenticeship at the Worcester Foundation, it happened that a periodic review by external scientists was due. One of the members of this visiting committee was the aforementioned Elwood Jensen. Although Jordan did not make a presentation (he was not the head of a research lab at the time), Jensen met with him informally and this proved to be historic.

Jensen suggested that Jordan should use a particular strain of rat, predisposed to breast cancer, to study drugs that might stop this disease. This was a breakthrough suggestion, and over the next months Jordan used this special strain of rats to study a particular drug that had been abandoned by a British pharmaceutical company.

Jordan discovered that this drug intercepted an estrogen hormone axis of breast cancer.

Based on Jensenís advice, Jordanís research at the Worcester Foundation led to the development of this drug for clinical use. It is called Tamoxifen and it has saved the lives of thousands of women.

Ironically, just at the time Dr. Jensen visited the Worcester Foundation, a young scientist on campus, Angela Brodie, was taking a different approach to breast cancer. Her focus was on a special enzyme involved in the progression of breast cancer.

Her work led to the development of a class of powerful breast cancer drugs that go by the technical term ďaromatase inhibitors.Ē

Like the work of Craig Jordan, Dr. Brodieís cancer drug advancements came to fruition in later years, but the roots of both Tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors, two frontline drugs today for breast cancer, had their roots in pioneering research at a small research institute, the Worcester Foundation, unparalleled then in steroid hormone science worldwide.

Drs. Jordan and Brodie have received many prizes now for their major contributions to the treatment of breast cancer. In each accepting speech on these vaulted podiums, they always emphasize the freedom they had to pursue their ideas.

Today, it is very unlikely that either of their research projects could win funding from the National Institutes of Health, the major funding body for biomedical research whose budget currently prevents funding of 90 percent of all new ideas scientists propose.

We taxpayers and citizens might think about what this situation portends for the future of biomedical progress. There was some money from local donors to help Craig Jordan and Angela Brodie, and these cherished dollars, invested early, changed the entire landscape of breast cancer treatment at a stage when federal funding could not have been won.

But local donors can only step up and do so much. NIH funding is the catalyst needed and it is now eroded to such a degree that less than 10 percent of all applicants and their new ideas receive a chance to show what they can do.

In memory of Elwood Jensen, and our two local heroes Craig Jordan and Angela Brodie, I call upon all citizens to support funding of the National Institutes of Health. Tamoxifen and the aromatase drugs are great achievements, but there is so much else out there to be discovered.

Thoru Pederson, Ph.D., is Vitold Arnett Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.